Today we’re talking to seltzer brand Hard FIZZ, which burst onto the beverage scene in 2020 with DJ Fisher at its helm. The brand has managed to secure some healthy attention thanks to its celebrity owner-investor model and guerilla marketing strategy. We asked Hard FIZZ’s Head of Marketing, Joel Scott, how the business got its celebrity ambassadors and how he orchestrates its bombastic marketing strategy.
How did the idea for Hard FIZZ come about?
JS: It was around 2018, and FISHER was playing in the States a lot, and seeing all these college students drinking seltzers at his shows… you could say it was a glimpse into the future.
Even he’d say he’d never heard of them, but after a bit of research, we could tell that category would eventually be huge in Australia too. We moved quickly to assemble our core group of founders and launched Hard FIZZ to market in early 2020.
What motivated you to eschew traditional marketing practices in favour of guerilla marketing?
JS: Our ‘owner investor’ model has worked really well for us. They’re ambassadors for the brand, but they’ve got skin in the game, so it’s in their interest to help promote Hard FIZZ within their own sphere of influence, be that music, sport or food. I think there’s something like three or four million social media followers between them.
Guerilla marketing is a very deliberate tactic for us. We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but we’ve figured out that if we put ourselves in a position where something could happen, it generally does, and the results far exceed traditional and paid marketing practices.
A great example is when FISHER was booked to play last year’s LIV Golf tournament in Adelaide; we tagged along as his entourage, but then the players all wanted to do ‘shoeys’ with us; next minute, Greg Norman himself walks out on stage and does a ‘shoey’ with a Hard FIZZ shoe, and that was the money shot from the whole event.
The year before that (2023), ‘Fish’ stormed the course unscripted and did a ‘shoey’ with Cameron Smith while he was mid round, there were cameras everywhere.
How do you approach celebrities and influencers to get them to promote your product in such a nontraditional marketing setup?
JS: The honest truth is we don’t (approach people) – they approach us!
It might be a bit of a cliche but I think we’ve created a ‘movement’ not just a brand, and that’s based around an ethos of ‘let the good times roll’ – even celebrities want to be part of that.
Recently, (British golfer and former world number 5) Ian Poulter posted to his Instagram, which has nearly 600,000 followers, a picture of him wearing an Australian flag bucket hat and drinking a Hard FIZZ – we had no idea about it till we saw it ourselves!
It wasn’t a paid partnership, he just loves the brand, and we’re more than happy to let ‘Poults’ post about it.
On a separate occasion, another one of our investors, Adelaide Crows captain Rory Sloane, cheekily landed the front page of the newspaper when he was photographed carrying a few boxes of Hard FIZZ into his end of season Mad Monday party – no one did anything stupid, and Rory himself is such a cleanskin, but that’s some serious exposure for the grand total of zero dollars.
We’ve also had Chris Hemsworth give us a shout out in the past.
What is the most difficult aspect of doing guerilla marketing and how do you address it?
JS: We don’t have any real control over it, so you can’t necessarily plan to get a result – it just happens!
I’ve previously been involved in another startup, a surfwear brand, and we had no budget for marketing, so we had no choice but to proactively look for opportunities to create those viral moments on social media.
With FIZZ, we’re now perfecting those lessons from that other business and aiming to hit more traditional and mainstream media outlets to get the most reach.
What is your vision for Hard FIZZ in the next couple of years?
JS: Launching a brand from startup is hard in any industry, alcohol or otherwise.
We have a few new flavours and concepts (outside of the seltzer category) in the works for 2025, and the plan is always to achieve more ranging in the retail outlets, and export overseas.
There’s also FISHER’s big Out 2 Lunch festival coming up on Surfers Paradise in May and Hard FIZZ is the major sponsor, so we plan to move something like 150,000 cans at that event alone.
